"In England they give a lot of nicknames," he said. "It's a good one, a nice one, very inventive."

It's no surprise that the Arsenal fans have taken so readily to Vermaelen. Many were bemused when Arsène Wenger decided the answer to last season's defensive troubles came in the form of a Belgian "left-back" who was "only" 6ft tall. Not even the Arsenal manager quite realised the impact his £10 million signing would have on the Premier League.

In just eight league games he has forged a strong partnership with William Gallas in the centre of defence and, remarkably, has scored five goals this season for good measure.

Not since the days of Tony Adams and Martin Keown have Arsenal had a hard man playing at stopper, but it looks like Wenger has managed to unearth the next best thing to Nemanja Vidic. Opposition after opposition striker has been 'Verminated'.

With hindsight, the signing of Vermaelen, 24 next month, looks like the best bit of transfer business of the summer. Incredible then, that six months ago it looked so unlikely.

Wenger decided he liked the cut of Vermaelen's jib when, during a preseason game with Ajax last year, the Belgian picked a fight with Robin van Persie (a former Feyenoord player, of course).

"I heard it from a lot of people that it was in his mind, that fight," Vermaelen said. The Frenchman certainly liked the blend of technique and aggression and resolved to get a closer look.

Towards the end of last season Arsenal's chief scout, Steve Rowley was detailed to go and watch Vermaelen in action for Ajax. He went to watch them away at PSV Eindhoven, a tough test against their big rivals. Ajax lost 6-2.

Despite the defensive disaster Rowley was not deterred and he came back for their next away game, against lowly Sparta Rotterdam. Ajax lost 4-0.

"Ten goals in two games!" Vermaelen said, cringing. "It was terrible, there was just two weeks in between. I don't know why they kept coming back to watch! I was playing left-back at the time and I wasn't even playing very well at that moment."

Rowley was displaying the determination of a T1000, and tracked his man to a Belgium training camp in Dunkirk. "He watched me there, he told me later," he said. "It was a stupid training camp. It was at the end of the season and we had to go to Japan for this friendly tournament.

"Nobody wanted to go and a lot of players had actually said they didn't want to go. I remember a lot of players from Anderlecht and Standard Liège had pulled out. There were six of us there, training on this bad pitch and thinking, why the hell are we here? And he was there."

The story goes that Rowley was convinced he had found his man when he watched this ramshackle training session. In between some sparring, the players started doing some jumps.

Vermaelen, despite being 6ft flat, sailed above his taller team-mates. Packed into his innocuous frame was the spring of a basketballer.

The next chapter of the story occurs in Mauritius. Before going on holiday Vermaelen's agent, the former Denmark player Soren Lerby, had told him that Arsenal were interested.

When, lying on the beach, an unknown number flashed up on his phone, Vermaelen suspected foul play. On the line comes someone claiming to be Wenger.

"Some of my friends we call people, joking, pretending to be someone else," he said. "I thought maybe it was one of the guys. It's guys from the national team, Jan Vertonghen and Moussa Dembélé, these guys are phoning everybody so for the first few seconds I was listening really, really carefully but after a few seconds I knew it was really him."

You can understand why Vermaelen might not quite have believed what was happening to him. He has come a long way, very fast. He was born in northern Flemish Belgium, near Antwerp, and brought up in a village called Stabroek.

"It's the opposite to London, very small," he said. "You knew everyone in the village. There were some farmers. My father is a plumber and ran his own company – my mum used to help him."

While his parents were not interested in sport – his father continues to be surprised at how good his son actually is – his maternal grandfather had been a good amateur player and his uncle was a youth coach at the local club Germinal Ekeren. Vermaelen started playing with them from the age of five and would watch the first team from the stands on the weekends.

"I remember our most famous player was Tomasz Radzinski, who played for Everton," he said.

"My uncle coached me when I was 12. There were much bigger talents than me but they didn't have the mentality to make it.

"It's important for a player to improve every year. Some players are big talents when you are 14 or 15 but they stop developing at the age of 17 or 18, then it's finished."

At 15, Vermaelen was invited to join Ajax's famous academy and for the next nine years he would work with some of the greatest Dutch internationals: Marco van Basten, Ronald Koeman, Danny Blind, Frank de Boer and Jaap Stam.

"Koeman put me in the first team and then Blind gave me the chance to play regularly, these two guys were very important to me. They taught me a lot of good things. They know what they're talking about – had a lot of experience in playing in this position."

The coaching obviously worked as Vermaelen improved season-on-season, in part modelling his game on Fabio Cannavaro, another centre back lacking height.

"I know I'm not tall but, if you speak to people at Ajax they'll tell you I was the best header there. They don't care about how big I am, whenever we were defending a corner I always had to take the tallest guy.

"I'm not that tall but you have to jump so that's how I try and compensate. I never trained for it. It's just timing, I guess."

Ajax's insistence on the technical and tactical aspects of a player's training was perfect preparation for the Arsenal ethos but even having trained with the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Wesley Sneijder could not prepare him for Robin van Persie, Andrei Arshavin and, above all, Cesc Fábregas.

"Playing and training with so many big stars, the beginning was a bit like a dream," Vermaelen admitted. "I think Fábregas is brilliant. If you play against him in the little training games – eight against eight – it is almost impossible to win."

Dick Advocaat, the Belgium coach, has just made Vermaelen the national team captain and, if Fábregas gets injured, Vermaelen is ready to do the same duty for his club. "It gives me a good feeling, being captain," he said. "If the coach turns round and says you're the captain it's a big honour for me.

"It's nothing I would try to go and get, but if he called on me I'd be honoured."

Thomas Vermaelen is supporting a group of Arsenal fans who are walking a hospital bed from the Emirates Stadium to Upton Park ahead of Sunday's fixture to raise money for the Gunners' Charity of the Season, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity.

You can show your support for the supporters completing the 10-mile trek from north to east London by donating to this great cause at www.justgiving.com/redactiongosh